


A Great Aunt's Love

by limeta



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon Compliant, Family, M/M, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2020-12-22 15:17:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21078959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limeta/pseuds/limeta
Summary: Bathilda Bagshot remembers her great-nephew Gellert Grindelwald.





	A Great Aunt's Love

Bathilda Bagshot knew that her great nephew was a bit, just a tad, if one might even dare to whisper it: queer.

Sure, yes, he'd gotten expelled for practising dark magic, but what was a little dark magic from a boy from a magical family? Certainly not that big of a problem to send the boy away from his mother and his motherland! Discarded and dismissed by family.

He stood out, oddly mismatched and angry and lost. The poor lad didn't even know English well enough to be enrolled into Hogwarts. Not that the homesick boy would have gone there, anyway.

Nevertheless it helped that Bathilda was old and had a penchant for knowing things.

She had her house elf make them something Hungarian. It was all worth it for the grateful glow in her nephew's blue eyes. They were full of such sadness, she noted and landed a comforting hand on his shoulder.

It made him turn rigid as he took a bite out of some goulash.

Her family was not kind, the ones that had moved a long time ago and not returned. They were hardened by plentiful Hungarian wars and they did not know how to calm a restless soul like her great nephew. She twisted her fingers inward, grasping him reassuringly.

''Your Auntie Bathilda's got you, dear boy.''

He choked on his goulash, whether from surprise or a sob, she would never find out.

His accent was thick, but his knowledge vast. What words he didn't know he vaguely explained using others and she listened to him raptly. History was important to know and just by being in her passionate nephew's presence, Bathilda knew he would make history.

Pouring over books and being stuck inside an elderly woman's home did not a man make, so Bathilda shooed him out.

''Go and meet your peers, dear boy!''

He had scowled, but did as bid.

He left in the morning and didn't return until very early the next day.

That night Bathilda had waited for her nephew to return well into the night. His plate had grown cold and untouched and Bathilda _worried_. She wrung her hands together and remembered muggles from her history books and how they had hurt her magical kind and how horrid things happened out of self defence.

Her nephew tried to sneak in, mindful of his supposedly asleep great aunt and then stopped dead in his track upon spotting a cross Bathilda Bagshot waving about her wand. Sparks flew out of it. She had never cast magic at him and she never would, but his vigilance helped her understand how he expected punishments to go.

''Explain yourself!'' She shouted and put away her wand, confusing him greatly.

He had tried to speak, found words and said, slowly, smiling: ''I created a friend.''

_''Made_ a friend.'' She corrected him, happy to see her nephew smiling and brimming with joy.

That happiness did not last long, Bathilda vividly remembered.

Albus Dumbledore was exactly what her great nephew did not need. She should have intervened. His family was full of tragedy and her blood did not need to be intermixed with their grieving impulsiveness. The Dumbledores spoke rarely to the other villagers at Godric's Hollow. They kept to themselves and made trouble where it wasn't necessary.

She caught the way her nephew looked at the auburn haired Englishman and not for the first time wished to intervene and tell him to stop their meddling. It did not suit a man of his stature to love fire. Not when he was earth and Hungarian soil that could give way for something beautiful to grow. That fire inside the eldest Dumbledore child was as hot as a Phoenix's death. He would mow down anything in his path, anything that her nephew made.

It was with a heavy heart that Bathilda heard her nephew sobbing and retching and clutching onto his wand and cursing in Hungarian, wondering if he had killed an innocent girl who had cared for him like a sister could. She scooped him up in her embrace and allowed him mental reprieve. His magic flared and burst and meandered and his sobbing turned to blubber and he cried into her arms and begged to be sent back to Hungary. She spoke to his parents and gave him that one wish.

When her nephew asked her how she had managed to get his father to take him back, Bathilda had lied: ''It was him who asked for you back, first.'' It had been the boy's mother that had wanted her son back.

It was _not_ with a heavy heart that Bathilda saw Albus Dumbledore's haggard expression of uncertainty, dancing in those blue eyes, not as intense and never as kind as her nephew's. He was not hers to love and he would never be. The grief he had caused her nephew would never be forgiven.

They never did find out which one of them killed the poor, sickly girl.

So they lived on, each convinced it was their own fault.

Her nephew fell into the dark comfort magic offered, entranced and enamoured by the tales of deathsticks and muggle subjugation. She pitied him and blamed herself. She was a Historian. It was her job to make sure he knew muggle subjugation was not a new invention, was not a new concept. Bathilda should have told him it was futile to attempt such a thing.

Albus Dumbledore was a professor and she pitied the children he would teach. One so fidgety whose magic burned, would never be neutral and objective enough to teach fickle children.

Bathilda Baghshot was the magical historian of England. She wrote many books (most famous of which was _Hogwarts: A History_). However, she would dare not write her nephew's downfall, and she would dare not give anyone else the chance to use her words against her imprisoned blood.

Albus Dumbledore was lauded a hero.

Her young nephew, lost and still so anguished, lay imprisoned alone.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, thanks for reading the fic !


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